Lying in Ponds

Andrew Cline of Rhetorica offers his take on Tuesday’s topic: why liberals and conservatives have trouble getting along.

George Lakoff, author of Moral Politics, demonstrates that liberals and conservatives understand politics in terms of two different metaphors of the family. He is co-author with Mark Johnson of the landmark work on metaphor entitled Metaphors We Live By, in which they state:

“Our ordinary conceptual system, in terms of which we both think and act, is fundamentally metaphorical in nature.”

What this means is: We understand non-literal concepts, such as “politics,” in terms of metaphor. The predominant metaphor of politics and government in our culture is: Government is a family. Liberals and conservatives have two different views of family and what is moral in terms of family dynamics, i.e. generally speaking, liberals operate with a nurturing parent metaphor and conservatives operate with a strict-father metaphor. This means that liberals and conservatives quite naturally see each other as failing morally.

And this difference in metaphor explains apparent political contradictions. For example, how can a conservative be pro-life and pro-death penalty? To the conservative, operating with a strict-father metaphor, this is no contradiction at all. The convict, having failed as a citizen, deserves punishment, even death, to protect the moral values of society. The unborn are totally innocent of any moral failing (until birth) and deserve protection.

It’s a commonplace of the Enlightenment that civic men should be able to discuss the issues of the day with mutual respect for honest differences of opinion. But, liberals and conservatives have two distinctly different moral systems. Each sees its own as naturally moral. This makes reaching such an ideal quite difficult–but not impossible. In our era, however, it is made all the more difficult by people such as Ann Coulter (right and left) who profit at the expense of civil, civic debate.

We had a very
intense thunderstorm yesterday afternoon,
and the cable modem at home may have been damaged by lightning.
Rather than taking his usual refuge in a bathtub, the extremely
nervous Silas the
One-Eyed Wonder Dog dove inside the pantry after a nearby strike,
knocking aside boxes of cereal and such in his search for safety.
Sorry for the late posting of today’s columns; hopefully I’ll be back
on schedule tomorrow.

In a memorable column last year, Charles Krauthammer suggested a fundamental distinction between conservatives and liberals:

To understand the workings of American politics, you have to understand this fundamental law: Conservatives think liberals are stupid. Liberals think conservatives are evil.

So what do we do with the current Lying in Ponds partisanship leader, Ann Coulter? Ms. Coulter clearly thinks that liberals are evil, charging them with the crime of treason in her latest book. I think a better theory is that many liberals and conservatives make the same (human) mistake — they find it easier to believe that their political opponents are lacking in intelligence or morality than to come to grips with the existence of millions of smart, well-intentioned people who sincerely hold very different political opinions from their own.

On Friday, The New York Times announced
that David Brooks, a senior editor at The Weekly Standard would
become a regular columnist beginning in September. The news makes
this paragraph from a
recent Brooks column a little ironic:

Wherever Democrats look, they sense their powerlessness. Even when
they look to the media, they feel that conservatives have the upper
hand. Conservatives think this is ludicrous. We may have Rush and Fox,
conservatives say, but you have ABC, NBC, CBS, the New York Times. But
liberals are sincere. They despair that a consortium of conservative
think tanks, talk radio hosts, and Fox News–Hillary’s vast right-wing
conspiracy–has cohered to form a dazzlingly efficient ideology
delivery system that swamps liberal efforts to get their ideas out.

Coming conveniently after a recent debate
between Hoystory
and Tapped
over whether columnists for the Times or The Wall Street
Journal is more one-sided ideologically, the addition of a second
conservative columnist would seem to settle the question in favor of
Tapped and the Times.

The position of Lying in Ponds is that newspapers are
free to be ideologically unbalanced in their choice of
columnists, but that newspapers which seek to serve a broad audience
should offer their readers a range of intelligent commentary. The
New York Times has taken an important step in that direction; when
will The Wall Street Journal expand the very narrow ideological
range of their columnists? Robert Bartley of the Journal seems
to imply that it won’t happen soon.

Robert Musil, in a very thoughtful post on
his Man Without Qualities weblog, says that he is “actually rather
skeptical of LIP’s methodology”:

Now it is unquestionably the case that a general media outlet can
render itself highly partisan merely by its selection of stories. For
example, assuming that the Presidential trip to Africa is objectively
more newsworthy than the simultaneous “he lied” meme, a general media
outlet could show partisanship by electing to devote massive coverage
to the “he lied” meme - but little to the simultaneous Presidential
trip to Africa.

But I have a big problem labeling a columnist “partisan” solely on
the basis of topic selection - even where that selection is motivated
by subjective partisan motives. One does not read Paul Krugman to find
“all the news that fit to print” - or commentary on “all the topics
that are fit for an academic economist to write about.”

My difficulties with Herr Doktorprofessor stem largely from his
reliance on (1) a constant stream of bad economics, including
incomplete economics, (2) false, misleading and materially incomplete
statements of fact and economic theory, (3) evasive language often
intended to allow him to claim credit for predictions where none were
made, and (4) a boring parroting of the then-current liberal
Democratic line that he attempts to tart up as original commentary.

I still enjoy reading LIP — but I don’t see how LIP’s criteria
pick up much of what bothers me about Herr Doktorprofessor. Perhaps
I’m wrong.

It’s not a bug, it’s a feature! The methodology used
here is an attempt to quantify only partisanship, and is not intended
as a more general guide to the quality of a columnist. There are many
other important traits such as accuracy, relevance, fairness, civility
and style, but Lying in Ponds makes no attempt to measure
them. I highly recommend other websites such as Spinsanity and Rhetorica, which grapple courageously
with some of those important issues.

I’m not sure that I understand why partisanship shouldn’t be
inferred when a columnist chooses to write about only topics which
tend to favor their own party or disfavor the other. A columnist
could choose topics with partisan intent, and write with
scrupulous accuracy about those carefully-limited subjects. But
wouldn’t the end result of such selectivity be a parade of partisan
half-truths?

In last week’s Paul Krugman review, I
mentioned the “Krugman Truth Squad” and linked to a Krugman-related
column on John Weidner’s Random Jottings blog. Donald
Luskin has since pointed out that a
series of his own Krugman critiques on the National Review
Online are also being referred to as the “Krugman Truth Squad”.

Weblogger Ed Cone
says of Lying in Ponds: “Interesting stuff, although even
without the complex methodology I had figured out that ‘Ms. Ivins
shows all the signs of being a very partisan columnist’ and placed Ann
Coulter at the top of the partisan charts.” I agree that some of the
top pundits are not unexpected, but some of the leaders have been a
surprise to me (Collin Levey and Claudia Rosett last year). I also hear from readers who
are horrified that their own favorite villain is not ranked highly.
When you actually evaluate every column, you find that
frequently-disliked columnists such as Maureen
Dowd and George Will actually write quite a few
nuanced columns and can sometimes go strongly the other way.

I was really trying to stay out of the debate between Matthew Hoy of Hoystory and Tapped over whether the New York Times or Wall Street Journal is more ideologically lopsided, or the most partisan. Mr. Hoy began by saying of the NYT that “There is not a major newspaper in the country whose collection of columnists are so dominated by one ideology.” Tapped responded by naming the WSJ as a counter example, saying that “if you think newspapers should, on principle, give equal time on their op-ed pages, you’d best include the Journal and The Washington Times in your litany of complaint.” Mr. Hoy persisted in his assertion (scroll down) that the NYT was more partisan. Finally, Tapped made an important point: “We don’t think ‘partisan’ is a very useful proxy for ideology; you can be both centrist and extremely partisan.” Tapped also cited last year’s Lying in Ponds results which found the WSJ OpinionJournal columnists as a group more partisan than the NYT.

A few thoughts and clarifications:

1. Lying in Ponds believes that while newspapers are certainly free to be ideologically unbalanced in their choice of columnists, both the NYT and WSJ have stated policies of independent commentary, which I interpret to mean that their columnists should not be excessively partisan, regardless of where they are ideologically. Lying in Ponds has argued for a critical distinction between an ideological-but-not-partisan pundit like Frank Rich and the excessively partisan Paul Krugman.
2. I was reluctant to try to compare the NYT and WSJ because of the fact that I evaluated only the OpinionJournal.com columnists — Al Hunt’s columns are usually available only on the main WSJ website, which requires a paid subscription. Because of that quirk, noted by both Tapped and Mr. Hoy, I can’t really compare the full sets of columnists properly. Having said that, I think that both newspapers can be legitimately criticized for partisanship. For the New York Times, Paul Krugman’s partisanship is extreme and unmatched by any other pundit at the Wall Street Journal or Washington Post. But I believe that other NYT columnists are unfairly criticized as partisan. Maureen Dowd, Bob Herbert and especially Nicholas D. Kristof each had lower partisanship scores last year than Collin Levey, Claudia Rosett, Robert L. Bartley, Daniel Henninger, Pete du Pont, Thomas J. Bray, Dorothy Rabinowitz, and Brendan Miniter from the WSJ.
3. Tapped quoted my year-end statement that the WSJ OpinionJournal had six columnists in the 2002 Top Ten, but that was my mistake. The number fluctuated between five and six all year but it ended up at five. I’ve now corrected that page — sorry about that.

Here’s something I intended to mention in
last Friday’s Ann Coulter
review. Some readers in the past have questioned the limitation of
categorizing partisan references only three ways — positive, negative
or neutral. The concern is that civil criticism and blistering
accusations would be scored the same way, possibly obscuring the difference
between responsible critics and slanderous flame-throwers. In
general, I think the scores of responsible critics will be lower
anyway because their reasoned arguments will unavoidably result in
contrary references. But the scoring system probably does
underestimate Ann Coulter’s partisanship, since so much of her
criticism of Democrats is so extreme. Here’s an example
from a
January column:

The Democrats’ jejune claim that Saddam Hussein is not a threat to our
security presupposes they would care if he were. Who are they kidding?
Democrats adore threats to the United States. Bush got a raucous
standing ovation at his State of the Union address when he announced
that “this year, for the first time, we are beginning to field a
defense to protect this nation against ballistic missiles.” The
excitement was noticeably muted on the Democrats’ side of the
aisle. The vast majority of Democrats remained firmly in their seats,
sullen at the thought that America would be protected from incoming
ballistic missiles. To paraphrase George Bush: If this is not treason,
then treason has no meaning.

If there was an additional category in the scoring system for
rabidly negative, paragraphs like the one above might make
Ms. Coulter invincible in our partisanship rankings.

Syndicated columnist Ann Coulter was a new addition to Lying
in Ponds at the beginning of 2003, and through the first six
months she is ranked as the most partisan
pundit out of the 32 which are currently evaluated, with a score
of 84 out of a possible 100 points. From Ms. Coulter’s biography:

Ann Coulter is a lawyer and author of the New York Times best seller,
High Crimes and Misdemeanors: The Case Against Bill
Clinton. Her most recent book, Slander: Liberal Lies
About the American Right , is a number one New York Times
Best-Seller.

Coulter is the legal correspondent for Human Events and writes a
popular syndicated column for Universal Press
Syndicate. She is a frequent guest on many TV shows, including
Politically Incorrect, Larry King Live, Hannity and Colmes, The
O’Reilly Factor, American Morning With Paula Zahn,
Crossfire, ABC’s “This Week”, Good Morning America, the Leeza Show,
and has been profiled in TV Guide, National
Journal, Harper’s Bazaar, and George Magazine. She was named one of
the top 100 Public
Intellectuals by federal judge Richard Posner in 2001.

. . .
A Connecticut native, Coulter graduated with honors from Cornell
University School of Arts & Sciences, and received her
J.D. from University of Michigan Law School, where she was an editor
of The Michigan Law Review.

Like Robert Scheer, Ann Coulter has been criticized so often by the
non-partisan analysts at Spinsanity that she has
been given her own section on the Spinsanity topics
page. Brendan Nyhan dissected Ms. Coulter’s techniques in a 2001
article titled “The Jargon
Vanguard“. More recently, the publication of her book “Treason”
has generated a round of denunciations from across the political
spectrum. Lying in Ponds pundits Richard
Cohen and Dorothy
Rabinowitz have both weighed in, and Mr. Nyhan has summarized
Ms. Coulter this way:

With her new book Treason: Liberal Treachery from the Cold War to the
War on Terrorism, syndicated pundit Ann Coulter has driven the
national discourse to a new low. No longer content to merely smear
liberals and the media with sweeping generalizations and fraudulent
evidence, she has now upped the ante, accusing the entire Democratic
Party as well as liberals and leftists nationwide of treason, a crime
of disloyalty against the United States. But, as in her syndicated
columns (many of which are adapted in the book) and her previous book
Slander: Liberal Lies Against the American Right, Coulter’s case
relies in large part on irrational rhetoric and pervasive factual
errors and deceptions. Regardless of your opinions about Democrats,
liberals or the left, her work should not be taken at face value.

So does Ms. Coulter use “irrational rhetoric” in the service
of excessive partisanship, or does her high partisanship score merely
reflect a consistent conservative
ideology? Despite the general caveat about jumping
to conclusions after only six months of columns, I can’t see any
explanation for
Ms. Coulter’s one-sided columns other than partisanship. Her leading
score is based on a ratio of 14-1 negative to positive Democratic
references and a 10-1 ratio of positive to negative Republican
references, leaving no doubt about how she feels about both parties.
Ms. Coulter continually makes blanket attacks on “Democrats”, using
the word negatively 53 times in 29 columns. Her score would be even
higher if not for the fact that she substitutes the word “liberals” an
additional 120 times, far more than any of our other pundits (Mona
Charen is second with only 27 “liberals”). Ideologues often criticize
their own party for insufficient purity, but Ms. Coulter’s negative
references to Republicans are mild and rare. Unlike Robert Scheer or
Peggy Noonan, Ms. Coulter’s columns have covered a range of topics,
but nearly every column becomes a partisan screed regardless of the
subject matter.

With a controversial Republican administration and Republican
control of both houses of Congress, it seems likely that Democratic
partisans would be energized by opportunities for criticism, perhaps systematically increasing
their partisanship scores. Defying that expectation, Republican
pundit Ann Coulter has seized the lead in the 2003 Lying in
Ponds partisanship rankings through a series of rants which
attempt to convince the reader that the political world is very simple
to understand — all liberals are bad, all Democrats are bad, and all
Republicans are good.

Syndicated columnist Robert Scheer, new to Lying in Ponds
this year, has the second-highest partisanship score through the first
six months of 2003. From his biography:

Robert Scheer, a journalist with over 30 years experience, has built
his reputation on the strength of his social and political
writing. His columns appear in newspapers across the country, and his
in-depth interviews have made headlines.

. . .

An accomplished author, Scheer has written six books, including
“Thinking Tuna Fish, Talking Death: Essays on the Pornography of
Power”; “With Enough Shovels: Reagan, Bush and Nuclear War” and
“America After Nixon: The Age of Multinationals.”

Over the years, Scheer has been honored for his work, including his
coverage of the underprivileged and the welfare system. Recently, he
was the 1998 honoree of the Shelter Partnership, an organization of
Los Angeles downtown businesses, and the USC School of Social Work’s
Los Amigos award recipient. He has also received awards and citations
from Stanford University, the Moscow Academy of Sciences, UC San Diego
and Yale University.

Scheer was raised in the Bronx where he attended public schools and
graduated from City College of New York. He studied as a Maxwell
Fellow at Syracuse University and was a fellow at the Center for
Chinese Studies at UC Berkeley, where he did graduate work in
economics. Scheer has also been a Poynter fellow at Yale, and was a
fellow in arms control at Stanford.

Robert Scheer has earned the dubious distinction of being one of
the few pundits to have a section devoted to them on Spinsanity’s handy
topics page. Spinsanity has been unsparing in
their criticism of Mr. Scheer, as in this 2001 piece by Ben Fritz:

At a time when all too many pundits engage in their share of lies,
spin, and jargon, Robert Scheer stands out in a class by himself. In
column after column, his favored tactics have been irrational
criticism, distortion, and spin. At his worst, Scheer’s false tropes
spread and become part of the commonly accepted discourse. Since
September 11, for instance, as Dan Kennedy noted in the Boston
Phoenix , the Taliban aid trope has been repeated in The Nation, The
New Yorker, The Denver Post and Salon. For those concerned about the
rise of irrational discourse in American politics, Robert Scheer
stands out as one of the worst offenders.

Lying in Ponds agrees with Spinsanity that
Mr. Scheer has practiced “irrational discourse”, but that doesn’t
necessarily make him guilty of partisanship. Mr. Scheer’s high
partisanship score results from his unrelenting criticism of the
Bush administration this year; his 14-1 ratio of negative to positive
Republican references includes contemplation of impeachment in five
different columns. Despite that, I believe that there are good
reasons to reserve judgment about whether Mr. Scheer’s one-sided
commentary should be considered to be evidence of excessive
partisanship:

• As I said in the Peggy
  Noonan review earlier this week, six months of columns is not
  a large enough dataset. Like Ms. Noonan, Mr. Scheer’s writing this year
  has been almost entirely concerned with issues surrounding the war in
  Iraq. As a staunch opponent of the war, Mr. Scheer’s high ranking may
  be misleading, because it doesn’t reflect his views on the wider range
  of subjects which would naturally arise over the period of a year or
  longer.

• Robert Scheer has been by far the most “asymmetric” pundit in the
  rankings, a term I’ve used to mean that he has a large imbalance in
  references to the two parties. He has hardly mentioned Democrats this
  year, only about one time for every 20 times he mentions Republicans.
  I had a dialogue
  with a reader earlier this year about whether it’s appropriate that
  the methodology allows a pundit to
  achieve a high partisanship score by criticizing one party without at
  the same time approving the other. I believe
  that it is appropriate, but I’m open to being persuaded
  otherwise. Again, a longer period of record should help clarify
  Mr. Scheer’s treatment of the Democratic party.

New York Times
columnist Paul Krugman is unusual
among the top pundits in that he writes regular columns while
continuing a full-time career as an award-winning economics professor
at Princeton University. From his biography:

Paul Krugman joined The New York Times in 1999 as a columnist on the
Op-Ed Page and continues as Professor of Economics and International
Affairs at Princeton University.

Krugman received his B.A. from Yale University in 1974 and his
Ph.D. from MIT in 1977. He has taught at Yale, MIT and Stanford. At
MIT he became the Ford International Professor of Economics.

Krugman is the author or editor of 20 books and more than 200 papers
in professional journals and edited volumes. His professional
reputation rests largely on work in international trade and finance;
he is one of the founders of the “new trade theory,” a major
rethinking of the theory of international trade. In recognition of
that work, in 1991 the American Economic Association awarded him its
John Bates Clark medal, a prize given every two years to “that
economist under forty who is adjudged to have made a significant
contribution to economic knowledge.” Krugman’s current academic
research is focused on economic and currency crises.

Paul Krugman easily
topped last year’s partisanship rankings, but he has dropped into
third place so far this year, behind two columnists who are new to
Lying
in Ponds. Because of his high scores, Mr. Krugman has
at times dominated the discussion here, and he continues to be a
hero to the left and a lightning rod for criticism from the right.
It would be a full-time job just to keep up with the missiles flying
between the “Krugman
Truth Squad” and Donald Luskin on
one side, and
Bobby Pelgrift’s Unofficial Paul
Krugman Archive and Mr. Krugman’s own
website on the other. Because of heightened reader
interest in Mr. Krugman, we have a very large body of his
columns to examine — all of them written for the Times in 2000, 2002 and 2003.

Over these two and a half years of columns, Paul Krugman’s
commentary has
been one-sided to an extraordinary degree. It is simply astounding
that not a single one of his 243 columns has been devoted mainly to
criticism of
Democrats or praise of Republicans. At first, Mr. Krugman wrote many
witty, thought-provoking and completely apolitical columns about
economics, but they have dwindled as the frequency of partisan
screeds
has increased. In 2000, 53 of his 98 columns contained no party
references, but in 2002, only 8 of 99 did, and so far this year only
one lonely column of 46 was non-political. Although Mr. Krugman
himself has explicitly
denied the charge of partisanship, the data doesn’t seem to
support any
of the proposed explanations for his one-sided punditry:

• Krugman is simply being critical of the party in power –
  Although
  Mr. Krugman’s early criticism of the Clinton administration is often
  cited, there is little evidence of such independence in recent years.
  In his 2000 columns, he made over 140 negative references to George
  W. Bush, but only 13 to Al Gore and a grand total of 3 to Bill
  Clinton, who served as a high government official at the
  time.

• Being hostile to Bush policies isn’t the same as being a
  Democratic partisan — Although he has called Democrats
  “hapless” and
  “ineffectual” on his
  website, Mr. Krugman has praised them consistently in the
  Times, with positive references exceeding negative references
  by a 3-1 ratio in 2000, 4-1 in 2002 and increasing to 5-1 this
  year.

• Krugman writes about economics, and he happens to disagree
  with
  Republicans on economic policy — Mr. Krugman wrote many columns
  on non-economic topics in 2002, but they’re just as partisan as the
  economics columns. There was an anti-Republican screed on the church
  and state issue, an anti-Republican screed on Trent Lott, an
  anti-Republican screed on climate policy, an anti-Republican screed
  on forest policy, an anti-Republican screed on drilling in Alaska,
  an anti-Republican screed on French elections (huh?), and many more.

All of this is made much more disappointing by the fact that
Mr. Krugman’s intelligence and credentials as an award-winning
economist are sorely needed in the national debate. For those of us
who know next to nothing about economics, a thoughtful opinion from
someone with Mr. Krugman’s background would be invaluable, but after
slogging my way through 243 columns without a single substantive deviation
from the party line, how could I expect to learn something about
which party’s position is better on any issue, when I already know
what his answer will be?

One of the syndicated
columnists added to Lying in Ponds this year, Molly Ivins had the fourth-highest
partisanship score after six months of columns in 2003. Ms. Ivins’
exceptional sense of humor is apparent in her biography:

Molly Ivins is from Houston, has a B.A. from Smith College, a Master’s
in journalism from Columbia University and studied for a year at the
Institute of Political Science in Paris. She began her career in
journalism as the Complaint Department of the Houston Chronicle. She
rapidly worked her way up to the position of sewer editor, from whence
she wrote a number of gripping articles about street closings.

. . .

She speaks both French and Spanish, loves to camp, canoe and run
rivers and is a semi-famous storyteller and beer-drinker.

She is author of two best-selling books, Molly Ivins Can’t Say That,
Can She? and Nothin’ But Good Times Ahead, both collections of essays
on politics and journalism. She has been a finalist for the Pulitzer
Prize three times and was the winner of the 1992 Headliners Award for
best column in Texas.

However, Ivins counts as her two greatest honors that the Minneapolis
police force named its mascot pig after her and that she was once
banned from the campus of Texas A&M.

As I said in yesterday’s review of Peggy Noonan, one should be very
cautious about drawing firm conclusions from only six months of
columns. But so far, Ms. Ivins shows all the signs of being a very
partisan columnist. Her ratio of 6-1 positive to negative Democratic
references and 7-1 negative to positive Republican references are quite
one-sided. She criticized Republicans in 45 of her 50 columns —
the one column which received a contrary score had only a single
offhand positive reference to Governor Jane Hull of Arizona.

One partisan
signature is the inability to resist digs at political opponents even
in columns on non-political topics. Perhaps it doesn’t rise
to the level of the Partisan
Non Sequitur Hall of Fame, but Ms. Ivins found a way to take shots
at both President Bush and Kenneth Starr in her
July 4th column on “the sheer improbable bliss of life in a free
country”. Another revealing trait is the tendency to rush to
criticism of political opponents based on premature or otherwise questionable
information. Ms. Ivins nominated Donald Rumsfeld for a “What
Were They Thinking?” title over the looting of the National Museum
in Baghdad. Although the looting story is now believed to have been
greatly
exaggerated, Ms. Ivins has not yet offered any sort of correction,
as far as I know.

From the biography
page of WSJ OpinionJournal columnist Peggy Noonan:

Peggy Noonan is a contributing editor of The Wall Street Journal. She
is also a contributing editor of Time magazine and Good Housekeeping,
a member of the board of the Manhattan Institute and author, most
recently, “When Character Was King” (Viking Penguin 2001). Ms. Noonan
was special assistant to President Ronald Reagan. In 1988 she was
chief speechwriter for Vice President George Bush as he ran for the
presidency. Her first book, “What I Saw at the Revolution: A
Political Life in the Reagan Era,” was published in 1990. She is also
author of “Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness” (1994), “On
Speaking Well” (1998), and “The Case Against Hillary Clinton”
(2000).

Before entering the Reagan White House, she was a producer at CBS
News in New York, where she wrote and produced Dan Rather’s daily
radio commentary. She also wrote television news specials for CBS
News. In 1978 and 1979 she was an adjunct professor of journalism at
New York University. Ms. Noonan lives in New York.

After six months, Ms. Noonan had the fifth-highest partisanship
score of the 32 pundits who are being evaluated. More than any other
columnist, Ms. Noonan’s high score comes from lavish praise of those in
her own party, often in the form of extravagant tributes like this one
to President Bush from her January
30 column:

This, truly, is a good man. And that is a rare thing. Agree with
Mr. Bush’s stands or disagree, there can be no doubting the depth of
his seriousness and the degree to which he attempts to do what he is
convinced is right, and to lead his country toward that vision of
rightness. We have had many unusual men as president and some seemed
like a gift and some didn’t. Mr. Bush seems uniquely resolved to be as
courageous as the times require and as helpful as they allow. There is
a profound authenticity to him, and a fearlessness too.

A steady hand on the helm in high seas, a knowledge of where we must
go and why, a resolve to achieve safe harbor. More and more this
presidency is feeling like a gift.

But I think that Ms. Noonan’s record this year shows the danger of
trying to draw firm conclusions from only six months of columns. Last
year, Peggy Noonan was also ranked very highly early in the year. But
then she wrote many non-political and other nuanced columns, wrote a tribute
to Paul Wellstone, and then ended the year criticizing
Trent Lott over her final three columns. She finished 2002 far down
in the rankings, and based on the complete Lying in Ponds
record of 18 months of columns, I have no hesitation in concluding
that Ms. Noonan is not really very partisan. Her strong support of
the war in Iraq has dominated her writing so far this year, but I
expect that her partisanship score will drop when she eventually turns
to a wider range of subjects.